What marketers need to know about call tracking

Call tracking helps online marketers know who called

Your agency or company may be getting calls all day long without you knowing where they’re coming from, who’s on the other end, and what they may want or need from you. 

Gathering customer data from these calls is essential in growing your business, but caller ID may not be enough. This is where the importance of call tracking comes in. 

Call tracking is a great way for online marketers to know who called, when they called, what they wanted, their location, and even transcripts of the conversation. Read on to know more about call tracking!

How It Works

Call tracking makes a careful record of the information about every call you receive on your website. Once you’re set up a call tracking software on your site and attached it to the phone number which you use as your primary contact method, it will automatically kick in whenever someone calls. It will record the caller’s location, address, company, and time of call, among other things. 

Some call tracking software can also record transcripts of calls so you can review conversations when needed, like when you need to review and confirm details of important transactions.

A Closer Look

Depending on the sophistication of the software you’re using, call tracking can capture the following data from the caller’s digital journey that you can use to optimize your marketing campaigns:

• Caller ID
• Location
• Call time start
• Duration
• Repeat caller
• Key presses
• Shopping cart activity
• Calling page
• Marketing channel
• Source campaign
• Keywords and terms
• Ad group
• Advertising partner IDs
• Call outcome
• Call recording

The data that you get through call tracking can be used to get a better and bigger picture of the outcome of calls to make better-informed marketing strategies and campaign optimization moves to enhance the customer journey and get the most out of the money you spend on campaigns.

Some Gaps in Call Tracking – And How to Bridge Them

Every system has gaps and issues that may pose challenges to users, and call tracking is not an exception. 

The four pain points most commonly experienced by online marketers with call tracking are difficulty of data manipulation to answer client’s questions regarding leads, complexity and digestibility of data reported, difficulty of report customization, and difficulty of integrating information from call and non-call leads. These pain points that your agency may be experiencing right now can be easily addressed by using a reliable call tracking software.

By reliable, it means that your call tracking software should make it easy for you to sort out, filter, and categorize data such as the source/medium, keywords, landing page callers converted on, their location, and more in order to be able to answer your clients’ questions about which marketing activities are responsible for the calls the business is getting.

A good call tracking software should also help you easily create reports that make sense to the client – instead of dense walls of figures about every single aspect of your activities that may be hard to make sense of, clients appreciate reports that include key metrics about your campaigns better. Your choice of call tracking software would have an impact on this ability.

But aside from simplifying your results for the client, your choice of call tracking software should also be able to help you answer their more complex questions. A good call tracking software will allow you to easily have the information you need – from both call and non-call leads – in one place instead of having to export them manually from different platforms and painstakingly place the data in a spreadsheet, which may cause delays in responding to important client questions.

The Bottom Line

Call tracking is an essential part of the digital marketer’s arsenal. It helps you record important data about the calls you’re getting, which can be used to optimize marketing strategies and activities. 

Your choice of call tracking software has an enormous impact on the success of your efforts, so make sure to choose one that can cover all your bases.

What call tracking software do you use or are interested in? Share it with us in the comments!